Point-demerit ratios

Sometimes it's easy to fall into a pattern of awarding lots of demerits and forgetting to highlight the positive things that students do. Research shows that this can have a really negative effect on a student's intrinsic motivation and can damage relationships.

We've been doing a lot of reading recently, and one simple rule stood out for us - the 5:1 rule. It's a simple best-practice approach that encourages at least 5 positive interactions for every 1 negative interaction, and we knew that we wanted to help schools with this.

Our new point-demerit ratio feature is now live and we've enabled it by default, though you can turn this off in site settings. It will highlight ratios in the demerit overview (staff and student tabs) and staff profile (demerits tab), giving teachers and school leaders a way to reflect on the frequency of positive to negative interactions happening within the school.

Other notable improvements

As always, we've been working on a long list of smaller incremental improvements - here are some examples:

• We've added the ability for schools to manually upload student photos for students not synchronized via Wonde.
• We've improved the user experience of student bios in various ways.
• We've added a new filter to enhance activity listings, making it easier to select activities.
• We've introduced a brand new point/demerit category editor on the site settings page.
• We've added an option for schools to display point and demerit sub-category graphs.
• We've added content searching to Messenger, with searches now highlighting if more results might be available.
• We've introduced a new quick-message feature on the student view contacts pages.
• We've added support for the new UK DfE attendance changes, including three-character codes.
• We've added an optional comment field to nominated prize draws.
• We've added color coding for student indicators throughout the site.
• We've improved attendance code labeling across the site.
• We've updated our strict password settings.
• We've allowed admins to use invites more frequently.
• And much more!

Class passes

Students being out of lessons without good reason has become a big problem for many schools and we want to help schools tackle this wellbeing issue with better visibility and insight into what is happening.